Nokia drops support for Skype app on the Lumia 610

23 May, 2012

Nokia has announced that it is dropping support for the Skype app for Windows Phone on their recently announced Lumia 610. The reason for this, according to them, is the below par user experience of using the app on this particular device.

The following is the full explanation from Nokia regarding the matter:

“Nokia values the user experience provided by its products and services. Therefore, although the Skype Windows Phone version is workable on Nokia Lumia 610, after in-depth testing, we found that the user experience is not up to par with Nokia and Skype’s expectation and decided not recommending users using Skype on Nokia Lumia 610. In the future, users of Nokia Lumia 610 would no longer be able to download Skype Windows Phone version from Window Phone Marketplace. However, Skype Windows Phone version would still be available for other users.”

The reason for the poor experience is likely to be the 800MHz processor and the 256MB of RAM on the Lumia 610, whereas every other Windows Phone currently available has 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. We find this a bit strange, due to Nokia's close relationship to Microsoft and with Microsoft actually owning Skype now, as to how they didn't manage to iron the issues out and make the app work properly on the Lumia 610.

This also makes us worry about how current apps will work when even more Windows Phones with slower processors and lower memory start rolling out later this year with the Tango update. If people who own Skype have been unable to optimize it properly for the lesser hardware, we wonder if third party developers will be able to do it.